The Lost Art of Treating Animals Like Animals

Charles Clayton's Great Grandfather and neighbor butchering a cow in Fraser circa 1918 or so.

We think, perhaps rightly so, of our animals as extensions of our families, and we treat them like people. For my entire life, family dogs have slept on the beds, the couch and the recliner, never spending a single night outside unless we were camping. They licked the dinner plates clean, gobbled expensive dog food and occasionally received thousands of dollars in veterinarian care, even when they were approaching the natural end of their lifespan.

Such attitudes would have been almost unthinkable a century ago. My Grandma grew up with a series of dogs named Shep, short for “shepherd” of course, which is what they were used for. Shep, all of them, slept with the animals in the barn; the very same barn where cows were slaughtered, strung up by their hindquarters and butchered; the same barn where elk hunted in surrounding mountains were turned into steaks; and where thousands of local trout were cleaned — knife in the asshole, slit the belly, guts thrown to the dogs. I’m sure the family loved Shep, and they certainly valued the vital role he played in keeping the cattle in line, but they still made him sleep in the barn.

There were horses in the barn as well, used to supply HORSEPOWER: the power of a horse, which, for thousands of years, was how people and goods moved upon dry land. It sounds idyllic, until you remember the brute animal force needed to pull tons of freight, drag the plow, the hay rake, the logs — and the crack of the whip required to get the beasts to carry your burden. Indeed, it would have been difficult to have been too soft hearted toward animals in those days, because you would have been in tears much of the time — during the late-19th century, for example, 700 horses were worked to death in New York City every day just to pull street cars.

When I was eight years old, I had a friend in Tabernash, a tiny town not far from Fraser. There were a number of Hispanic families there who had come up from southern Colorado decades earlier to work on the railroad. Many of them still kept chickens, and slaughtered them, cut their heads off right in front of us. I had never seen that before, haven’t seen it since — the chopping block, the sharp hatchet, the frantic fluttering, and the final crazy dance of a bloody headless chicken. Later that afternoon, we happened to have chicken salad sandwiches for lunch. I ate my sandwich, reluctantly, but not without pondering, for the very first time, the animal I was chomping between my teeth.

Not long ago, customers of Whole Foods market decided that the live lobster tanks behind the seafood counter were cruel, and they successfully demanded the tanks be removed. Just imagine what those folks would have thought of my Tabernash chicken experience. Had that chicken been slaughtered in front of a Whole Foods market anywhere in America, especially in front of children, irate customers would have called for a boycott of the chain, and the ouster of the CEO. Just like those poor lobsters suffering in the tank — peering through the dirty glass, claws banded shut, waiting to be boiled alive — the sight of a headless chicken would have ruffled some yuppie feathers. Blood. Guts. Death. A terrible tragedy. Yet those same consumers, vegetarians notwithstanding, have no problem snapping up shrink-wrapped free-range chickens, ground-up grass-fed cows or filets of various fish, not to mention a bit of lobster tail when it suits their fancy, provided they don’t have to see the actual living creature beforehand.

My daughter and I recently watched “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” — a horribly cute movie that features a surprisingly harrowing scene where dogs are kidnapped and forced into an underground Mexican dog-fighting ring. It was a short scene, with no actual violence, but it made my daughter cry and her daddy cringe. I think we can all agree that folks involved in that sort of thing are among the lowest scum of the earth, and in my mind there is a special place reserved for them in hell, but at the same time, on some bizarre level, I have more respect for blood sport spectators gambling on vicious pit bulls than I do for sensitive do-gooders trying to ban live lobster tanks from grocery stores: at least the dogfighter vermin are witness to the carnage they’re responsible for.

We smugly think we’ve evolved into a kinder, gentler people, who treat animals in a civilized way, but really we’ve simply relegated the killing floor to some unknown place far removed from our daily lives, out of sight and out of mind, leaving the dirty work to immigrants whose names we’ll never know, and whose lives are as abstract to us as the meat that ends up on our plate. We don’t whip horses anymore — now we use refineries to whip energy from barrels of crude oil, and the trusty sheep dog has been replaced by soldiers (backed by billion-dollar weaponry), who herd petroleum into secure stock pens. Not to mention related externalities: drowned polar bears, poisoned groundwater, failed blowout preventers … we’re not kind, and we’re not gentle — we’re in denial.

Perhaps we need some blood on our hands. Not metaphorical blood — we’ve got plenty of that — but actual blood, warm and fresh from the animal we’re about to eat. Or maybe a whip in our hands, a mule in the driveway and an urgent need to get to work on time. Not so we can be cruel to animals, but so we can remember how utterly dependent we are on them (and their TEMPORARY petroleum substitutes) for our collective survival. Life feeds on life, and, for now, we’re at the top of the food chain, which makes us the biggest feeders of all. It would behoove us all to remember this next time we’re snuggled up on the couch with the family dog.

Frequent contributor Charles Clayton, a native of Colorado’s Fraser Valley, lives in Taos, NM. His last story for the Gazette was “New River, Arizona: Three Glimpses,” which appeared in #181. His blog, “Pagan Parenting,” can be found at mountaingazette.com.

8 thoughts on “The Lost Art of Treating Animals Like Animals”

CC, Thanks for this one. If you are going to eat it, you’d best be willing to look into its eyes, to ethically kill and chop it up.
But even if dog-fighter vermin are witness to the (senseless and cruel) carnage for which they are responsible, they should still burn in hell, after being strung up by their toenails and tortured long… and slow…
Payback’s a bitch.

Clayton writes the truth and perhaps only because I too have witnessed the beheading of the family meal am I not put off by it. Indeed I agree wholeheartedly that the core problem is the preppie clean freaks who obsessively use hand sanitizer 29 times a day so that they don’t catch anything that might toughen up their systems all the while whining about their preference for humanely slaughtered flesh prepared out of sight and out of mind.

When did America become a nation of delicate whiny ass politically correct pansies?

Or are they just the ones the press want us to believe we’ve become? F that, I prefer the candor of the Mtn Gazette crowd. Kudos to Clayton, let the dog sleep outside.

this article is a good reminder of how we use (and some might say abuse) animals. back in the 1970’s newly married i learned some valuable lessons from my hispanic father in law. once after quail hunting i brought him some quail meat to enjoy. he asked where is the wing and leg meat? i was accustomed (maybe thru impatience, certainly ignorance) to throw everything away save the quail breast. never again did i waste game meat. then another incident with my father in law. we had a billy goat we were raising for the barbecue pit. he was rambunctious and i asked my father in law who had been a sheepherder in southern new mex if he would castrate the billy? he had castrated many rams in his day. he brought his sharp old timer pocket knife, a dauber made from a stick and clean piece of cloth (no walgreens q-tip pardner!), and the “medicine” he put on the incised scrotum was none other than creosote oil! (to keep the flies off he said)the surgery required me as his assistance. i held the billy’s ass end over a “tambo” (55 gallon drum) while chico incised…..no tequila for the billy or any other anesthetic…………

“on some bizarre level, I have more respect for blood sport spectators gambling on vicious pit bulls than I do for sensitive do-gooders trying to ban live lobster tanks from grocery stores: at least the dogfighter vermin are witness to the carnage they’re responsible for.” This speciously sensitive line reeks of liberal, but tough guy “let me shock you.” One of my exxes was a Viet Nam vet, Special Forces medic. We were hiking in some Northern Az. forest and two might hunters charged ahead of us. “The only fair hunting,” he said, “is human for human.” In that spirit, how about being plunged into boiling water; castrating male humans with rusty blades; setting out on a soft September morning to bag other humans…then writing a sensitive manly essay about it. We are a nation of voyeurs. We make me want to puke.

Mary, you and I already know that were it a legal spectator sport, folks would pay good money to watch men rip one another apart, limb from bloody limb, until one outlived the other. Better’n any fightin’ dogs, I imagine. And how about we give the red capes and long knives to bulls in the ring… well, you get the picture.

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